Perşembe, Kasım 06, 2014

"Authoritarian and militarist tendencies of Turkish political structure have for so long been blamed both in theory and in politics on the series of military coup d’états, in particular on the 1980 coup.1 My primary aim here is to offer a framework that goes beyond the civil-military dichotomy through revealing the discursive continuities on national security from the militaryrule to the civilian Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) governments of the 2000s."

REVISITING NATIONAL
SECURITY DISCOURSE IN TURKEY WITH A VIEW TO

PACIFICATION: FROM
MILITARY POWER TO POLICE POWER ONTO

ORCHESTRATION OF LABOUR
POWER

Gülden Özcan

Abstract

In this article, I try
to analyse the neoliberal re-structuration in Turkey with a view to fabrication
of official national security discourse and its adaption as common sense among
productive classes. Acknowledging pacification as a counter-hegemonic approach
to securitization, I offer an alternative framework to study the role of national
security in Turkish politics that goes beyond rather traditionalized
civil-military dichotomy. I argue that national security is a technique aiming
at pacification with both imperial and local targets and that it should be
understood with recourse to the neoliberalism-security-pacification axis. The
article composes of three sections. First, I explore the history of the term
pacification. Second, I look at the discursive continuities on national
security between the military regime and the civilian AKP governments. Third, I
reflect on the alternative forms of solidarity emerged during the Gezi
Resistance that open the possibility of creating a counter-hegemonic common
sense.

“In this article, I try
to analyse the neoliberal re-structuration in Turkey with a view to fabrication
of official national security discourse and its adaption and adoption among
productive classes as common sense through making use of the conceptual
framework pacification provides. In Turkey, the neoliberal-authoritarian nexus
was initiated under the three-year military interim regime following the 1980
military coup when the official discourse on national security was transformed
and expanded to include literally everything; so much so, one of the generals
who could define national security as follows:

“In this country, from
rice prices to highways to touristic places there is not a single matter that
is not related to national security. If you are thinking too deeply, that as
well becomes a matter of national security (quoted in Ahmad, 1999: 156, my
translation). “

Authoritarian and
militarist tendencies of Turkish political structure have for so long been
blamed both in theory and in politics on the series of military coup d’états,
in particular on the 1980 coup.1 My primary aim here is to offer a framework
that goes beyond the civil-military dichotomy through revealing the discursive
continuities on national security from the militaryrule to the civilian Justice
and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) governments of the
2000s. It is my contention that the civil-military dichotomy in the analyses of
Turkish politics has in turn masked the differences among diverse approaches on
the issue and set a blockage on the critical understanding of specificities of
the diverse politics on diverse issues. As a result of this dominant approach a
perception has emerged assuming that if it was not for the military tutelage
Turkish political life would not have suffered all the misconducts,
anti-democratic procedures, oppression and so on. With this aim in mind, I
start off by exploring the term pacification, then move forward to Turkey’s
transition to neoliberalism, and then to the AKP rule. I will conclude with a
brief discussion of how counter-hegemonic actions in the face of security
measures were developed during the Gezi Resistance that started on May 2013.”